BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | JULY 21, 2023
The NATO Summit in Vilnius (July 11-12) signalled that there is absolutely no possibility of talks to settle the Ukraine war in a foreseeable future. The war will only intensify, as the US and its allies still hope to inflict a military defeat on Russia although that is clearly beyond their capability.
On July 14, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of US joint chiefs of staff said that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is “far from a failure” but the fight ahead will be “long” and “bloody”. Milley has a reputation for speaking what the White House wants to hear, no matter his professional judgment.
Indeed, on July 19, the Biden administration announced additional security assistance of about $1.3 billion for Ukraine. The Pentagon said in a statement that the announcement “represents the beginning of a contracting process to provide additional priority capabilities to Ukraine.” That is to say, the US will be using funds in its Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative program, which allows the administration to buy weapons from industry rather than pull from US weapons stocks.
According to the Pentagon, the latest package includes four National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) and munitions; 152 mm artillery rounds; mine clearing equipment; and drones.
Meanwhile, in an ominous development, no sooner than Russia let the UN-brokered grain deal expire on July 17, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky disclosed that he had sent official letters to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan suggesting to continue the grain deal without Russia’s participation.
On the very next day, Kiev followed up with an official letter to the UN’s International Maritime Organization spelling out a new maritime corridor passing through Romania’s territorial waters and exclusive maritime economic zone in the north-western part of the Black Sea.
Evidently, Kiev acted in concert with Romania (a NATO member country where the 101st Airborne Division of the US army is deployed). Presumably, the US and NATO are in the loop while the UN’s imprimatur is being arranged. It goes without saying that the NATO has been working on a new maritime route in the Black Sea for sometime already.
This is a serious development, as it seems a precursor to involving the NATO in some way to challenge Russia’s domain dominance in the Black Sea. Indeed, the NATO’s Vilnius Summit Communiqué (July 11) had forecast that the alliance is gearing up for a vastly enhanced presence in the Black Sea region, which has been historically a Russian preserve, where its has important military bases.
The relevant para in the NATO Communiqué said: “The Black Sea region is of strategic importance for the Alliance. This is further highlighted by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. We underline our continued support to Allied regional efforts aimed at upholding security, safety, stability and freedom of navigation in the Black Sea region including, as appropriate, through the 1936 Montreux Convention. We will further monitor and assess developments in the region and enhance our situational awareness, with a particular focus on the threats to our security and potential opportunities for closer cooperation with our partners in the region, as appropriate.” [Emphasis added.]
Four things need to be noted:
Most certainly, a new maritime route in northwestern and western regions of the Black Sea along Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey (all of whom are NATO member countries) will cut off the Russian garrison in Transnistria (Moldava) and would boost Kiev’s capability to strike at Crimea. The NATO involvement would complicate any future Russian operations to liberate Odessa as well, which is historically a Russian city.
Apart from the huge legacy of culture and history, Odessa is a port head for the industrial products of Russia and Ukraine. The Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline (which the Ukrainian saboteurs blew up recently) is one of the best examples. The 2,471 km pipeline, the longest ammonia pipeline in the world, connected the world’s largest ammonia producer, TogliattiAzot, in Russia’s Samara region with Odessa Port.
In strategic terms, without control over Odessa, NATO cannot have force projection in the Black Sea region or hope to resurrect Ukraine as an anti-Russia outpost. Nor can NATO advance toward the Transcaucasus and the Caspian (bordering Iran) and Central Asia without dominating the Black Sea region.
And for the same reasons, Russia cannot afford to cede the Black Sea region to the NATO, either. Odessa is a vital link in any land bridge along the Black Sea coast connecting the Russian hinterland with its garrison in Transnistria, Moldova (which the US is eyeing as a potential NATO member.) In fact, Crimea’s security will be endangered if hostile forces establish themselves in Odessa. (The attack on the Kerch Bridge in October 2022 was staged from Odessa.)
Clearly, the entire US project on the new maritime route is intended to pre-empt Russia from gaining control of Odessa. It factors in the strong likelihood that with the Ukrainian offensive floundering, Russia may soon launch its counter-offensive in the direction of Odessa.
From the Russian perspective, this becomes an existential moment. The NATO has virtually encircled the Russian Navy in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea (with the induction of Sweden and Finland as members). The freedom of navigation of the Baltic Fleet and the dominance in the Black Sea, therefore, become all the more crucial for Russia to freely access the world market round the year.
Moscow has reacted strongly. On July 19, Russian ministry of defence notified that “all vessels sailing in the waters of the Black Sea to Ukrainian ports will be regarded as potential carriers of military cargo. Accordingly, the countries of such vessels will be considered to be involved in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the Kiev regime.”
Russia has further notified that “the north-western and south-eastern parts of the international waters of the Black Sea have been declared temporarily dangerous for navigation.” The latest reports suggest that the Black Sea Fleet of warships are rehearsing the procedure for boarding foreign ships sailing to Ukrainian waters. In effect, Russia is imposing a sea blockade of Ukraine.
In an interview with Izvestia, Russian military expert Vasily Dandykin said he would now expect Russia to stop and inspect all ships sailing to Ukrainian ports. “This practice is normal: There is a war zone there, and in the past two days it has been the scene of missile strikes. We’ll see how this will work in practice and whether there will be anyone willing to send vessels to these waters, because this is very serious.”
The White House has accused Russia of laying mines to block Ukrainian ports. Of course, Washington hopes that the NATO moving in as the guarantor of the grain corridor, replacing Russia, would have resonance in the Global South. The Western propaganda caricatures Russia as creating food scarcity globally. Whereas, the fact of the matter is that the West didn’t keep its part of the bargain reciprocally to allow the export of Russian wheat and fertiliser, as has been acknowledged by the UN and Turkey.
What remains to be seen is whether beyond the raging information war, any NATO country would dare to challenge Russia’s sea blockade. The chances are slim, the daunting deployment of the 101st Airborne Division in next-door Romania notwithstanding.
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 20, 2023
A 13,685-page tranche of documents related to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials released Tuesday contain details about the deaths of 16 trial participants, the prevalence of severe adverse events (SAEs) and other abnormalities.
The documents, previously submitted by Moderna to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as part of the licensing process for Moderna’s Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine, also exposed an “utter lack of thoroughness” in how the trials were conducted, according to Defending the Republic (DTR), a Dallas-based nonprofit that obtained the documents via a a still-pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against Moderna.
The documents, shared with The Defender in advance of their public release, are the first set of “Moderna documents” to be released as part of the lawsuit — with approximately 8,000 more pages expected to follow later this year.
Travis Miller, a Fort Worth-based attorney representing DTR, told The Defender, “These documents include over 13,500 pages relating to serious adverse event listings that document injuries — such as shingles and Bell’s palsy and other more serious conditions — which we believe may be related to the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.”
DTR also received documents describing experiments involving mRNA injections on rats in 2017-2018, prior to the onset of COVID-19. Miller told The Defender these studies revealed fetal abnormalities in pregnant rats.
Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, said the Moderna clinical trial data bear similarities to the outcomes seen in the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trials, and raise several questions about safety and liability.
Nass told The Defender :
“Both the preclinical (animal) studies of Moderna and of Pfizer revealed skeletal abnormalities in the offspring of vaccinated mice and rats at higher-than-normal rates and revealed vaccine components travelled throughout the body into all organs.
“Both the Pfizer and Moderna trial data in humans reveal concerning deaths and side effects that were attributed to other causes, but likely were vaccine side effects.”
Nass said “it appears” the FDA did not perform due diligence regarding the clinical trials for each vaccine.
“Did the FDA perform its required regulatory function to oversee the conduct of the trials?” Nass asked. “Or did Operation Warp Speed wave the vaccines through without a proper FDA review of the data?”
Nass asked “who is responsible” if the FDA failed to “perform its regulatory tasks?”
She said the clinical trial data also lead to questions about the liability shield enjoyed by vaccine manufacturers:
“If Moderna (and Pfizer) knew of more problems with the vaccines than they acknowledged, will they have liability under the PREP Act?
“Finally, pilot lots of vaccine (used for the clinical trials of the Pfizer vaccine, and likely the Moderna vaccine) were considerably different than lots made later, using different methods. This was noted by the European Medicines Agency.
“Therefore, do the clinical trial findings even apply to everyone else who received the vaccine later?”
Serious adverse events routinely classified as ‘unrelated’ to vaccine
Four of the six files contained in the documents released Tuesday contained data from the human clinical trials for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. The documents date from between November 2020 and June 2021.
Miller criticized Moderna’s lack of scientific rigor in determining the causes of the deaths and adverse events, saying that, in several cases, “Individuals who died after receiving the Moderna vaccine were not given an autopsy.”
According to DTR, “The study’s authors indicated that of those 16 deaths, only two autopsies were performed, five of the dead were not autopsied, and the autopsy status of nine of the dead was ‘unknown.’”
In one instance, a 56-year-old woman experienced “sudden death” 182 days after receiving her second dose of the Moderna vaccine. The cause of death was listed as “unknown” and no autopsy was performed.
“It seems they purposely decided not to investigate suspicious deaths in case the Moderna vaccine might be the cause,” DTR stated in its summary.
Yet the deaths “did not stop those running these ‘studies’ from concluding, despite the absence of evidence, that the Moderna vaccine was not related to these deaths,” DTR added.
Several trial participants also developed neurological disorders, DTR said. “One 44-year-old female had ‘left side facial paralysis’ just eight days after the second dose” and “Numerous vaccinated participants saw the onset of shingles less than 10 days after vaccination.”
This was not the full extent of SAEs sustained by trial participants. According to DTR:
“A number of participants experienced: myocardial infarction (heart attack); pulmonary embolism; spontaneous abortion/miscarriage; transient ischemic attack (TIA); and lymphoma.
“Subsequent analyses of reports from the FDA VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System] database, the Department of Defense’s DMED [Defense Medical Epidemiological Database], and European regulators showed heightened rates of these illnesses following administration of the Moderna vaccine.”
VAERS has historically been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.
Similar to the Pfizer documents released last year, the Moderna documents indicate SAEs were routinely classified as being “unrelated” to the vaccine. According to DTR:
“… similar to their treatment of deaths post-vaccination, the studies seemed predestined to conclude that these serious adverse events — many of them life-threatening — were not related to the Moderna vaccine. It didn’t matter whether the adverse event occurred within days of vaccination.
“All this creates serious doubt about the safety of the Moderna vaccine and the standards by which it was approved by the FDA,” Miller said.
According to DTR, the documents also contained “troubling” evidence from animal studies.
Referring to the results of one study, DTR stated, “The findings of this study are troubling: the mRNA vaccine altered the skeletal variations of the rat fetuses and the ‘female pregnancy index’ of the vaccinated rats was significantly lower than the control group.”
Other abnormalities noted in this study included an above-average rate of “common skeletal variations consisting of wavy ribs and increase[d] nodules,” a “statistically significant higher” mean number of reproductive cycle lengths and a lower incidence of mating and pregnancy in the mRNA-1273 group rats compared to the control group.
Moderna included an older study, conducted in 2017 and 2018, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, in its application for FDA approval. The study showed similar results, with mRNA found in several organs.
According to DTR, “Testing revealed that ‘mRNA-1647 was detected in all of the analyzed tissues except for kidney[s],’ with elevated levels of mRNA-1647 found in the spleen and eye. Notably, mRNA-1647 was detected in the brain and heart.”
FDA twice denied FOIA requests for release of the Moderna documents
Miller told The Defender that DTR sued Moderna after the FDA “wrongly denied our request for the expedited production of the records submitted by Moderna in support of its Biologics License Application (BLA) for its COVID-19 vaccine ‘Spikevax.’”
The lawsuit was filed June 7, 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas – Dallas Division — the same federal court that previously ordered the release of the FDA documents pertaining to the approval of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. The court rejected the FDA’s proposed release schedule to make those documents public over a period of 75 years.
DTR said it reached an agreement earlier this year with the FDA for the production of approximately 24,000 pages of some of the most important records submitted by Moderna in support of its Biologics License Application.
The agreement, announced March 31, required the FDA to release the first 13,685-page set of documents by July 17, and the remainder by the end of 2023.
The FDA granted full approval of Moderna’s Spikevax on Jan. 31, 2022. On Feb. 3, 2022, DTR filed a FOIA request with the FDA, “seeking the expedited production of records relating to the FDA’s approval of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.”
However, the FDA twice rejected DTR’s request — first on Feb. 9, 2022 and again on June 6, 2022 — claiming DTR had not shown “a compelling need for expedited processing” of the documents. DTR sued the FDA the following day.
While the lawsuit is still ongoing, Miller told The Defender it will be “dismissed per agreement by the parties” once the FDA provides the remaining documents.
According to Miller, these documents include:
The documents are expected to be released by the end of the year.
Miller told The Defender he hopes the findings in the Moderna documents will “at a minimum, lead to further Congressional oversight of the FDA’s approval process and for accountability within that agency.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | July 21, 2023
It was a strange experience watching the House hearing in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was testifying. The topic was censorship and how and to what extent federal government agencies under two administrations muscled social media companies to take down posts, ban users, and throttle content. The majority made its case.
What was strange was the minority reaction throughout. They tried to shut down RFK. They moved to go to executive session so that the public could not hear the proceedings. The effort failed. Then they shouted over his words when they were questioning him. They wildly smeared him and defamed him. They even began with an attempt to block him from speaking at all, and 8 Democrats voted to support that.
This was a hearing on censorship and they were trying to censor him. It only made the point.
It became so awful that RFK was compelled to give a short tutorial on the importance of free speech as an essential right, without which all other rights and freedoms are in jeopardy. Even those words he could barely speak given the rancor in the room. It’s fair to say that free speech, even as a core principle, is in grave trouble. We cannot even get a consensus on the basics.
It seemed to viewers that RFK was the adult in the room. Put other ways, he was the preacher of fidelity in the brothel, the keeper of memory in a room full of amnesiacs, the practitioner of sanity in the sanatorium, or, as Mencken might say, the hurler of a dead cat into the temple.
It was oddly strange to hear the voice of wise statesmen in that hothouse culture of infantile corruption: it reminded the public just how far things have fallen. Notably, it was he and not the people who wanted him gagged who was citing scientific papers.
The protests against his statements were shrill and shocking. They moved quickly from “Censorship didn’t happen” to “It was necessary and wonderful” to “We need more of it.” Reporting on the spectacle, the New York Times said these are “thorny questions”: “Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”
These are not thorny questions. The real issue concerns who is to be the arbiter of truth?
Such attacks on free speech do have precedent in American history. We have already discussed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 which led to a complete political upheaval that swept Thomas Jefferson into the White House. There were two additional bouts of censorship folly in the 20th century. Both followed great wars and an explosion in government size and reach.
The first came with the Red Scare (1917-1020) following the Great War (WWI). The Bolshevik Revolution and political instability in Europe led to a wild bout of political paranoia in the US that the communists, anarchists, and labor movement were plotting a takeover of the US government. The result was an imposition of censorship along with strict laws concerning political loyalty.
The Espionage Act of 1917 was one result. It is still in force and being deployed today, most recently against former President Trump. Many states passed censorship laws. The feds deported many people suspected of sedition and treason. Suspected communists were hauled in front of Congress and grilled.
The second bout occurred after the Second World War with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Army-McCarthy hearings that led to blacklists and media smears of every sort. The result was a chilling of free speech across American industry that hit media particularly hard. That incident later became legendary due to the exaggerations and disregard for the First Amendment.
How does the Covid-era censorship fit into this historical context? At Brownstone, we’ve compared the wild Covid response to a wartime footing that caused as much trauma on the homeland as previous world wars.
Three years of research, documents, and reporting have established that the lockdowns and all that followed were not directed by public health authorities. They were the veneer for the national security state, which took charge in the month of February 2020 and deployed the full takeover of both government and society in mid-March. This is one reason that it’s been so difficult getting information on how and why all of this happened to us: it’s been mostly classified under the guise of national security.
In other words, this was war and the nation was ruled for a time (and maybe still is) by what amounts to quasi-martial law. Indeed, it felt like that. No one knew for sure who was in charge and who was making all these wild decisions for our lives and work. It was never clear what the penalties would be for noncompliance. The rules and edicts seemed arbitrary, having no real connection to the goal; indeed no one really knew what the goal was besides more and more control. There was no real exit strategy or end game.
As with the two previous bouts of censorship in the last century, there commenced a closure of public debate. It began almost immediately as the lockdowns edict were issued. They tightened over the months and years. Elites sought to plug every leak in the official narrative through every means possible. They invaded every space. Those they could not get to (like Parler) were simply unplugged. Amazon rejected books. YouTube deleted millions of posts. Twitter was brutal, while once-friendly Facebook became the enforcer of regime propaganda.
The hunt for dissenters took strange forms. Those who held gatherings were shamed. People who did not socially distance were called disease spreaders. Walking outside without a mask one day, a man shouted out to me in anger that “masks are socially recommended.” I kept turning that phrase around in my mind because it made no sense. The mask, no matter how obviously ineffective, was imposed as a tactic of humiliation and an exclusionary measure that targeted the incredulous. It was also a symbol: stop talking because your voice does not matter. Your speech will be muffled.
The vaccine of course came next: deployed as a tool to purge the military, public sector, academia, and the corporate world. The moment the New York Times reported that vaccine uptake was lower in states that supported Trump, the Biden administration had its talking points and agenda. The shot would be deployed to purge. Indeed, five cities briefly segregated themselves to exclude the unvaccinated from public spaces. The continued spread of the virus itself was blamed on the noncompliant.
Those who decried the trajectory could hardly find a voice much less assemble a social network. The idea was to make us all feel isolated even if we might have been the overwhelming majority. We just could not tell either way.
War and censorship go together because it is wartime that allows ruling elites to declare that ideas alone are dangerous to the goal of defeating the enemy. “Loose lips sink ships” is a clever phrase but it applies across the board in wartime. The goal is always to whip up the public in a frenzy of hate against the foreign enemy (“The Kaiser!”) and ferret out the rebels, the traitors, the subversives, and promoters of unrest. There is a reason that the protestors on January 6 were called “insurrectionists.” It is because it happened in wartime.
The war, however, was of domestic origin and targeted at Americans themselves. That’s why the precedent of 20th century censorship holds in this case. The war on Covid was in many ways an action of the national security state, something akin to a military operation prompted and administered by intelligence services in close cooperation with the administrative state. And they want to make the protocols that governed us over these years permanent. Already, European governments are issuing stay-at-home recommendations for the heat.
If you had told me that this was the essence of what was happening in 2020 or 2021, I would have rolled my eyes in disbelief. But all evidence Brownstone has gathered since then has shown exactly that. In this case, the censorship was a predictable part of the mix. The Red Scare mutated a century later to become the virus scare in which the real pathogen they tried to kill was your willingness to think for yourself.
Brownstone Institute | July 20, 2023
Despite the uproar surrounding the case, Judge Terry Doughty’s order in Missouri v. Biden was straightforward. It prohibited government actors from colluding with social media companies to censor “content containing protected free speech.”
In other words, the defendants – including the White House, the CDC, and the Department of Justice – must obey the Constitution they swore to uphold by adhering to the First Amendment. The censorship regime responded with familiar doublethink: denying the censorship exists while arguing that it must continue.
On Tuesday, the court held a hearing to consider whether Judge Doughty’s order should be reinstated. The oral arguments revealed the government’s three-part strategy: deny, deflect, and defend. Its lawyers denied the established facts, deflected from the controversy, and defended its actions through outlandish justifications.
In doing so, they demonstrated the censorship apparatus’s lack of remorse for stripping Americans of their constitutional liberties. Even worse, they insist that the totalitarian operations must continue.
At the hearing, government defendants maintained that plaintiffs have manufactured the case. Like their allies in the media, they argued that allegations of censorship were nothing more than “an assortment of out-of-context quotes and select portions of documents that distort the record to build a narrative that the bare facts simply do not support.”
The censorship is nonexistent, they insist. It is a “thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory,” in the words of Larry Tribe.
Unlike issues of legal interpretation, this is a factual matter. Either government actors colluded with Big Tech to suppress Americans’ free speech rights or they did not. Discovery revealed extensive documentation proving that they did, and the defendants make no effort to explain how Judge Doughty’s 155-page order detailing dozens of violations of the First Amendment is merely “an assortment of out-of-context quotes.”
Journalists including Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Berenson have detailed the “censorship industrial complex,” the entangled web of government agencies, NGOs, and private-public partnerships that seek to control the free flow of information. But reviewing that series of connections and collusions is unnecessary – the defendants’ recorded statements contradict their denial.
“Thank you for the ongoing collaboration,” one bureaucrat wrote after a US Government “industry meeting” with Big Tech companies in October 2020.
White House Advisor Rob Flaherty took a different tack in his demands to Twitter: “Please remove this account immediately.” The company complied within an hour. “Are you guys fucking serious?” he wrote to company officials after they failed to censor critics of the Covid vaccine. “I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.” His boss was similarly direct regarding posts from RFK, Jr. “Hey Folks-Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP.”
There is no need to recreate Judge Doughty’s 155-page opinion, but the denial of the censorship regime is facially absurd. Alex Berenson’s case, the revelations of the Twitter files, and the undisputed facts of Missouri v. Biden refute the defendant’s premise.
Rather than address the case’s inconvenient facts, government lawyers quickly pivoted to their second tactic: deflection. They avoided the case and Judge Doughty’s ruling in favor of a hypothetical narrative.
At one point, they defended government agencies’ right to issue health advisories that say “the vaccines work or smoking is dangerous.” They argued, “There’s nothing unlawful about the government’s use of the bully pulpit.” That reasoning was uncontroversial, but it was not responsive to Judge Doughty’s order.
Under Doughty’s ruling, the White House can denounce journalists, deliver press briefings, publish on social media, enjoy the bully pulpit, and take advantage of the friendly media environment; it just can’t encourage private companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.
The defense conflates free speech with control over information to deflect attention from the censorship at issue. The tactic is not limited to the government’s powers under the order.
During the hearing, the judge asked the defense attorneys whether saying “the COVID vaccine does not work” is constitutionally protected free speech. “That speech itself could be protected,” the attorney responded at one point. After repeatedly refusing to concede that the First Amendment protects political opinions that deviate from President Biden’s agenda, he resorted to Russian fear-mongering.
“Let’s say it was spoken by a covert Russian operative, that would not be protected by free speech,” he told the judge. Like the issue of the government’s “use of the bully pulpit,” restricting Russian operatives’ speech is unrelated to Judge Doughty’s order.
The attorney’s refusal to defend basic First Amendment liberties was telling. The defense instinctively changed the issue from free speech to national security, relying on an oft-used fear tactic to subvert the First Amendment.
These deflections deliberately obfuscated the purpose of the hearings. Defendants implied the plaintiffs sought to ban anti-smoking PSAs and fund Kremlin media campaigns. Like their strategy of denial, the goal was to avoid discussion of their extensive censorship operations.
When the government was forced to address the case, it resorted to claiming that Covid justified the abolition of constitutional liberties. The pandemic-made-us-censor argument continued the pervasive Doublethink. Eradicating democratic norms was necessary to protect democracy, they reasoned. Previously, the Biden Administration told the court that reversing the order was necessary “to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”
Defendants argued that the evidence of the case vindicates the government actors. The attorneys said “It shows, in the face of urgent crises, a once-in-a-generation pandemic and bipartisan findings of foreign interference with U.S. elections, the government responsibly exercised its prerogative to speak on matters of public concern.”
They continued, “It promoted accurate information to protect the public and our democracy from these threats. And it used the bully pulpit to call on various sectors of society, including social media companies, to make efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation.”
Demonstrating no remorse, they remain proud of their efforts to usurp the First Amendment because of their self-professed noble aims. They expect this defense to evade judicial scrutiny.
When confronted with past censorship – including CISA’s “switchboarding” leading up to the 2020 election – defendants reasoned that prior conduct was not pertinent to the case because plaintiffs could not prove it will happen again.
They described the Department of Homeland Security’s unconstitutional censorship campaigns as “occurring long in the past.” They argued that health officials’ emails working to silence opponents should be disregarded because they were sent “more than two and a half years ago.”
The censorship apparatus is asking the courts to trust them to act responsibly despite repeatedly demonstrating its indifference, or perhaps disdain, toward the First Amendment.
While the government’s denials and deflections are insulting to the citizens they purport to represent, we must remain focused on their aim: they appealed Doughty’s order because they oppose constitutional restraints on their control of information.
We would hope that requiring the government to obey the Constitution would be uncontroversial; now, it may signify whether the rule of law still stands in the United States.
By Dan Hart | The Washington Stand | July 20, 2023
A fiery hearing held Thursday by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” unexpectedly became an opportunity for Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reflect on civility and the seminal importance of free speech in the wake of Democratic committee members accusing him of being racist and anti-Semitic.
In his opening statement, Kennedy announced that he would be setting aside his prepared remarks so that he could address the accusations of racism and anti-Semitism leveled at him by ranking member Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-V.I.), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D-Fla.), and others. Kennedy’s testimony ended up becoming an impassioned plea for Americans of all political persuasions to become more empathetic of each other and to have greater respect for the free speech protections enshrined in the Constitution.
“Debate — congenial, respectful debate — is the fertilizer, it’s the water, it’s the sunlight for our democracy,” he said, after noting that his speech in April announcing his Democratic 2024 presidential bid was deplatformed by YouTube. “We need to be talking to each other.”
Kennedy then referred to a letter signed by 102 of his fellow Democrats in Congress that attempted to get him barred from testifying at the hearing because of his supposed “anti-Semitism,” noting that “this itself is evidence of the problem that this hearing was convened to address. This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.”
“Censorship is antithetical to our [Democratic] party,” Kennedy continued. “It was appalling to my father, to my uncle [John F. Kennedy], to FDR, Harry Truman, Thomas Jefferson. … [Opposition to censorship] sets us apart from all the other forms of government. We need to be able to talk. The First Amendment was not written for easy speech. It was written for the speech that nobody likes you for.”
He went on to observe that the Biden administration invented the word “malinformation” to censor him and others. “There was no misinformation on my Instagram account. Everything I put on that account was cited and sourced by peer-reviewed publications or government databases. … I was removed for something they called ‘malinformation.’ Malinformation is information that is true but is inconvenient to the government, that they don’t want people to hear. That’s antithetical to the values of our country.”
Kennedy further explained that after he announced his candidacy for the presidency, it was harder for the administration and social media platforms to censor him. “So now I’m subject to this new form of censorship which is called ‘targeted propaganda.’ … I am being censored here … through smears, through misinterpretations of what I’ve said, through lies, through association, which is a tactic that we all thought had been discredited and dispensed with after the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. But those same weapons are now being deployed against me to silence me.”
Kennedy then launched into a fervent appeal for the Democratic Party to turn away from polarization, censorship, and demonization.
“This toxic polarization is destroying our country today. How do we deal with that? This kind of division is more dangerous for our country than any time since the American Civil War. … Every Democrat on this committee believes we need to end that polarization. Do you think you can do that by censoring people? I’m telling you: you cannot. That only aggravates and amplifies the problem. We need to start being kind to each other. We need to start being respectful to each other. We need to start restoring the comity to this chamber and to the rest of America. It has to start here.”
After noting that his uncle, former Senator Ted Kennedy, was able to pass a record amount of legislation by reaching across the aisle, Kennedy discussed the cordial relationship between Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.
“There are no two people in the country who feel more differently about American politics than these two people, and yet they are friends,” he observed. “Dennis attended his children’s basketball games, attended his daughter’s wedding. This is how we need to start treating each other in this country. We have to stop trying to destroy each other, to marginalize, to vilify, to gaslight each other. We have to find that place inside of ourselves of light, of empathy, of compassion. And above all, we need to elevate the Constitution of the United States which was written for hard times. That has to be the premier compass for all of our activities.”
Immediately after Kennedy finished his statement, Wasserman Schultz moved to halt the hearing, claiming that his past statements on race violated the committee rules. Her motion was voted down. Later in the hearing, Wasserman Schultz refused to allow Kennedy to fully respond to her direct questioning of him regarding his reference to an NIH-funded study that suggested that the coronavirus may have been engineered to target particular ethnicities. Instead of allowing Kennedy to provide context for what he said, Wasserman Schultz repeatedly interrupted his attempted response by stating “reclaiming my time” over and over again.
Later in the hearing, Kennedy issued a stern warning about where government censorship of the citizenry can lead.
“A government that can censor its critics has license for every atrocity,” he underscored. “It is the beginning of totalitarianism. There’s never been a time in history when we look back, and the guys who were censoring people were the good guys. All of us grew up reading Arthur Koestler, Robert Heinlein, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and they were all saying the same thing: once you start censoring, you’re on your way to dystopia and totalitarianism.”
The Cradle | July 20, 2023
The US Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have barred 14 Iraqi banks from conducting transactions in US dollars as part of a “sweeping crackdown” to stop Iran and other sanctioned nations from acquiring the greenback, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on 19 July.
US officials say the new sanctions were issued after discovering “information” showing the banks “engaged in money laundering and fraudulent transactions, some of which may have involved sanctioned individuals and raised concerns that Iran could benefit.”
“We have strong reason to suspect that at least some of these laundered funds could end up going to benefit either designated individuals or individuals who could be designated,” a senior US official told the WSJ.
The banks targeted by the punitive measures are small institutions reportedly “heavily involved” in US dollar transactions.
According to Iraq’s Shafaq News, the targeted banks include the Islamic Advisor for Investment and Finance, the Islamic Qartas for Investment and Finance, Al Mustashar Islamic Bank, Elaf Bank, Erbil Bank, the International Islamic Bank, Trans-Iraq Bank, Mosul Bank, Al-Rajeh Bank, Sumer Commercial Bank, Trust International Islamic Bank, the World Islamic Bank, and Zain Iraq Islamic Bank.
The sanctions came only one day after the US State Department issued a new 120-day sanctions waiver to allow Baghdad to deposit payments for Iranian natural gas into non-Iraqi banks in response to criticism that the White House is responsible for recent power cuts at the height of Iraq’s blistering hot summer.
Since 2003, all Iraqi oil revenues have been paid into an account with the US Federal Reserve. Although Iraqis formed a sovereign government after the US invasion and occupation of their state, Iraq is still restricted from opening accounts for its oil earnings outside the US.
Given its dominance of the global financial system, Washington can control all funds of Iraq’s Central Bank through threats or sanctions, even though these funds are not deposited exclusively in US banks. Furthermore, Iraq’s oil funds, which in 2022 amounted to more than $90 billion, remain in one single account in New York Fed – the institution that two years ago unilaterally blocked Afghanistan from accessing its foreign reserves, plunging the nation into an unparalleled crisis.
Last November, the US Treasury cut off four Iraqi banks from access to dollars and imposed tight controls on wire transfers, sending the economy reeling.
To negate the effect of these unilateral measures, Baghdad has been looking to move trade away from the greenback and, in May, banned the use of the US dollar for both personal and business transactions.
Earlier this month, the commercial advisor to the Iranian embassy in Iraq, Abd al-Amir Rabihawi, revealed that Baghdad proposed that the two nations switch trade payments to the Iraqi dinar to combat US economic coercion.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | July 13, 2023
As new CDC director Dr. Mandy Cohen takes the helm of the agency, the topic of ‘chestfeeding’ has hit the media as guidelines from the CDC now recommend off-label use of drugs to enable men to breastfeed.
Palestine Information Center – July 19, 2023
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM – The Hamas Movement has strongly denounced the US House of Representatives for passing a resolution claiming that the Israeli occupation state is “not a racist or apartheid state.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Hamas condemned the resolution as a flagrant US bias in favor of the occupation state and a step intended to encourage it to persist in its crimes and violations against the Palestinian people, especially its ethnic cleansing policy.
“This US resolution has ignored the black history of the Zionist occupation, which is filled with dozens of massacres, and turned a blind eye to the crimes that were committed recently by settler gangs under military protection in Huwara town and dozens of Palestinian villages, which were exposed to arson attacks and organized destruction of homes, vehicles and farms,” Hamas underscored.
Hamas described the recent settler crimes in the West Bank as “an example of the racist practices and the ethnic cleansing policy that are pursued by the occupation state against the Palestinian people.”
“Many Israeli officials have voiced fascist positions, such as the recent remarks of the criminal minister, Smotrich, in which he gave the Palestinians the choice between living in the so-called state of Israel as second-class citizens or being banished or killed,” the Movement said.
“Such a US resolution will not change the reality of the criminal and racist Zionist occupation entity, which relies on ethnic cleansing, displacing the rightful owners of the land and replacing them with intruders,” it added.
The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling Israel “not a racist or apartheid state,” on Tuesday
The measure passed, in a 412-to-nine vote, a few hours after president Joe Biden met with Israeli president Isaac Herzog at the White House.
The legislation comes in response to remarks last Saturday from Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in which she called Israel a “racist state.”
Later, the congresswoman apologized following pressures, while stressing that Israel’s “extreme right-wing government has engaged in discriminatory and outright racist policies.”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 20, 2023
There is currently an unprecedented legal battle raging in the US between several state attorneys general, a judge who is siding with them, versus a court of appeals that is reluctant; and there’s the activities of the White House that prompted it all.
It’s the case of serious accusations leveled at the Biden administration and major social platforms of colluding to suppress free speech; and even though the developments in the lawsuit so far give some reason for optimism, those in Congress who are vocal about the need to separate the state and “the Church of Big Tech,” as it were, are not resting easy.
Whether or not the First Amendment case results in a resounding victory for the anti-censorship side in the battle, some Republicans are trying to make sure that there is actual legislation in place, rather than only a possible precedent set by a court ruling, to protect speech.
Currently, this is happening in the form of two House spending bills (here and here) that concern the likes of the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – but not exclusively – which basically seek to “defund state-driven censorship,” i.e., these federal agencies’ collusion efforts with Big Tech, the extent of which is shockingly documented in the Twitter Files.
One proposal is to ban the DHS and a group known as the Global Engagement Center from banding together to police online speech.
It comes as Congress is considering the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that is approved every year. A provision would now prevent the Department of Defense (DoD) from bankrolling organizations like NewsGuard, the Global Disinformation Index, and Graphika Technologies.
The wording of the bill is stark: if passed, the Pentagon (DoD) would be banned from giving money to groups that, “advise the censorship or blacklisting of news sources based on subjective criteria or political biases” – doing so under the guise of combating “misinformation,” “foreign propaganda,” and/or performing “fact checking.”
Similar provisions can be found in the House bill drafts that cover the said agencies, but also the Executive Office of the President, the Justice Department, the FBI – and many more.
The Global Engagement Center, meanwhile, is singled out as effectively the kingpin in what the bills refer to as the “censorship industrial complex.”
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | July 20, 2023
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. took his expression of support for the government of Israel to the maximum level in a Wednesday Twitter post. After criticizing the administration of President Joe Biden for “threatening Israel with the ending of the special relationship between” Israel and the United States, Kennedy declared, “As President, my support of Israel will be unconditional.”
Looking through the wave of negative comments and quote tweets that quickly appeared in response to Kennedy’s post, it looks like Kennedy took in the tweet a position that could be destructive to the base that has developed for his campaign over the last few months.
Many individuals took Kennedy’s criticism of US intervention related to Ukraine and Russia as suggesting that he would pursue consistently as president a noninterventionist foreign policy. That hope is being dashed.
Kennedy has also made a central focus of his campaign skepticism toward activities of the US government that Kennedy has argued in many instances have harmed the American people while advancing the wealth and power of special interests. Many supporters who share this skepticism will find it hard to accept that meanwhile it is appropriate to give support unconditionally to a foreign government.
Kennedy’s endorsement of the special relationship between the US and Israel, as well as his commitment to providing unconditional support to the Middle East nation as president, follows his discussion of his great admiration for Israel in an interview earlier this week.
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Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Reknowned economist M. Shahid Alam offers this excellent critique of Noam Chomsky’s defective analysis of the relative influence of Oil versus the Israel lobby over US foreign policy: … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
